The Elephants in the Room
After more than a week of vegging out in the posh Nimman neighborhood of Chiang Mai, it was time to get out of the city and see what else Thailand had to offer. So Masha booked a whirlwind 1-day tour to see everything north Thailand has to offer — elephants, temples, waterfalls, etc.
Shaking hands with the elephants
Elephants are inextricably linked to Thai culture and history. Akin to horses elsewhere in the world, they are like family members that may also double as work animals, or remain lazy siblings that can eat you out of house and home — 350 pounds of food a day, specifically. Traditionally, each elephant has a person with whom they form a bond for the duration of their (or the person’s) life, called a mahout. They spend most of the day together, reinforcing the family bond and caring for the elephant.
There is a wide range of elephant-activities you can do in northern Thailand, from the most difficult to justify — riding tours where they are basically circus animals (still popular among Asian tourists) — to experiences that are far more hands-off and relaxed and better for the animals themselves. For example, a family we met in Thailand told us about their tour — a day spent just being with a band of elephants, walking with them through the forest as they ate their fill of tasty trees and leaves.
We picked the middle of the road option, as is our want. Our tour consisted of about 3 hours at a small indigenous people-run sanctuary, where the elephants roam the preserve much of the time with their mahouts. (Having afterward stopped by a massive commercial operation for lunch, we appreciated that ours was a small group activity with two other families and very different from this elephant-tour-factory).
The program started with a change of clothing into traditional local clothes. This was key to the later activity of getting super dirty. Then, to ingratiate us to the elephants, we fed them bananas and sugar cane, and prepared a vitamin capsule of sorts — a mash of bananas, nuts, fruits, fiber and vitamins stuffed into the banana peels. After this, we attended a brief class about elephants and their lives. We learned, for example, that the Indian elephants that live in Thailand are a lot smaller than African elephants, but still poop out an average human’s worth of dung every day (hence the ubiquitous poo paper). Masha also cannot forget the fact that elephants gestate for 21 months — a gloriously heroic feat of motherhood (a fact Mike was already well aware of).
I guess they enjoyed those treats, because they got all touchy-feely
Looks like elephant kisses are not Masha’s thing… she describes it as a slobbery suction cup
Then, we crossed to the opposite shore of the river to get them nice and dirty, and feed them some more sugar cane of course
and us nice and clean —
After some more hugs and posed pictures,
it was bathing time!
Throughout the experience, it was hard to tell which parts the elephants actually enjoyed, as the trainers kept telling us (after all, they do roll in the dirt and wade in the water on their own), and how much they were forced into doing just for us. But, playing in the river did seem to be their favorite activity, where they got pretty rambunctious
And before we knew it, the time came for a touching goodbye
Being around these strangely docile, but obviously super intelligent animals was a bit surreal. Their eyes seem to say, if we weren’t stuck in these goofy bodies, if we had your opposable thumbs, oh, the wonders we would work!
I believe it.
Bua Tong Sticky Waterfalls
The next stop was nearly as wondrous. The Bua Tong “sticky waterfalls” are probably not the only ones of their kind in the world, but I’ve never heard of another. You would think that climbing up these cascades as water rushed into your face would be super hard and dangerous. But, amazingly, on this rock, you become a regular gecko…
The surface rocks of the waterfalls are made of porous calcium carbonate, which acts like velcro to skin. Thus, you can go up this three hundred foot sequences of four waterfalls in the span of less than twenty minutes just on your own two feet. It’s an unparalleled experience.
And Then
Other than the elephant experience and the sticky waterfalls, we also went to the huge and colorful Wat Ban Den temple complex (see this account about temples we saw in Thailand) and Angels Land. The latter is a (recently) entirely man-made complex designed for great insta shots that is surprisingly popular. Masha and I agreed that unless you’re purely chasing Instagram pictures, it can be safely skipped, as it’s very visibly fake. It does, however, have a lot of shade and mist on a hot day and a pen of adorable bunnies that you can feed and pet, so who knows… maybe not so bad after all
We don’t normally do a lot of tours, but we’ve had good look with day long tours, including this one. The furthest stops were more than an hour from Chiang Mai, which gave us a lot of time to talk with our guide about Thailand’s culture and politics, role of religion, and everything under the sun. It was a very memorable day. When Masha puts her head to planning us an adventure, good things happen.
